To eGov'ers,
The following is a relevant thread to our discussion today raised by Daniel Bennett re: human & machine readable data. The thread was a discussion started in September 2012 related to what might be contained in a best practice recommendation for US Government Agencies & Offices vis a vis mark up to improve access, readability & re-use of government Web pages.
This executive summary is, stick with RDFa 1.1 Lite because it enjoys both support from the world's major search engines *and* the Web's standard organization, the W3C.
Cheers,
Bernadette Hyland, co-chair
W3C Government Linked Data Working Group
Charter: http://www.w3.org/2011/gld/
Begin forwarded message:
> From: "Thomas, George (OS/ASA/OCIO/OEA)" <George.Thomas1@hhs.gov>
> Subject: Re: [DataGov-DEV] FW: Updated Microdata to RDF Working Draft
> Date: September 26, 2012 5:35:58 PM EDT
> To: Bernadette Hyland <bhyland@3roundstones.com>, "Marion Royal (XI)" <marion.royal@GSA.GOV>
> Cc: "DATAGOV-DEV@LISTSERV.GSA.GOV" <DATAGOV-DEV@LISTSERV.GSA.GOV>
>
> Agree, and the RDFa 1.1 Lite Primer answers Marion's question about XHTML vs HTML5 â€“ from that doc;
>
> "RDFa 1.1 is specified for both XHTML [XHTML-RDFA] and HTML5 [HTML-RDFA]."
>
> RDFa 1.1 Lite is a subset of RDFa 1.1.
>
> -g
>
> From: Bernadette Hyland <bhyland@3roundstones.com>
> Date: Wednesday, September 26, 2012 4:46 PM
> To: Marion Royal <marion.royal@gsa.gov>, George Thomas <george.thomas1@hhs.gov>
> Cc: data gov <DATAGOV-DEV@listserv.gsa.gov>
> Subject: Re: [DataGov-DEV] FW: Updated Microdata to RDF Working Draft
>
>> Hi George & Marion,
>> You're not the only one with a headache, I'd like to think I got some ice cream in the deal ;-)
>>
>> The following guidance is provided as a practitioner of Linked Data for the USG and W3C Gov't Linked Data working group co-chair. It is as current as you're likely to find. My sources include the co-chair of W3C RDF WG & Schema.org. I hope this helps the Open Data working group.
>>
>> The goal of this discussion is to provide structured data within HTML pages. Agencies want to do this because they want people to gather structured data and re-use it. If Agencies publish this data in structured ways, tools can spider and use it; developers can use it and humans can access/re-use it easier. This is what open data people consider nirvana.
>>
>> The question is, should US Government produce pages with:
>> a) microdata
>> b) RDFa 1.1 Lite [1]
>> c) RDFa 1.1 [2]
>> d) none of the above
>>
>> The answer: b) - RDFa 1.1 Lite
>>
>> The US Government is best served by producing Web pages with RDFa 1.1 Lite because the large search engines, as members of Schema.org, have agreed to parse that information. Google and Yahoo! have been supporting RDFa 1.1 Lite for some time. Other big search engines, e.g., Bing, Yandex have agreed to support it through Schema.org. Further, RDF 1.1 Lite, is fully upward compatible to RDFa 1.1. Thus, anyone with structured data that cannot be expressed in RDFa 1.1 Lite *can* express it in RDFa 1.1 and the search engines will get out of it what they can.
>>
>> The USG should not be recommending the use of microdata. Microdata is an evolutionary dead end. We don't want to limit what people might want to say in structured data in Web pages in the future.
>>
>> Again, to be perfectly clear, experts on Web standards should be giving clear guidance to US Government Agencies to use RDFa 1.1 Lite, not microdata. RDF 1.1 Lite is basically microdata except you can define different vocabularies. This is a good thing because organizations describe data in different ways.
>>
>> If you review only one primer on RDFa 1.1 with treatment of RDFa Lite, please see the W3C "RDFa 1.1 Primer", Ben Adida, Ivan Herman, Manu Sporny, Mark Birbeck, eds, published 07-June-2012.[3]
>>
>> Just for completeness on this thread, today (Sept 2012) we have two W3C Standards for expressing RDF, they are RDF/XML and RDFa. The RDF Working Group is currently working to standardize Turtle, N-triples, JSON/LD which is imminent.
>>
>> The W3C HTML5 specification is currently an "Editor's Draft" as of 25-Sept-2012. The Editors include people from Microsoft, W3C and Apple. The working group is charter through 31-Dec-2014 which implies that an HTML5 Recommendation is expected sometime in 2014.
>>
>> Keep your feet on the path of RDFa 1.1 Lite and we'll all reach open data nirvana in this lifetime.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Bernadette Hyland, co-chair
>> W3C Government Linked Data Working Group
>> Charter: http://www.w3.org/2011/gld/
>>
>> [1] RDFa Lite 1.1, W3C Recommendation, June 7, 2012, Manu Sporny, editor, see http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-lite/
>>
>> [2] RDFa Core 1.1, W3C Recommendation, June 7, 2012, Ben Adida, Mark Birbeck, Shane McCarron, Ivan Herman, editors, see http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-core/
>>
>> [3] RDFa 1.1 Primer, see http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/
>>
>>
>> On Sep 26, 2012, at 2:12 PM, Marion Royal (XI) wrote:
>>
>>> I just got an ice cream headache.
>>> One of these days, though, when I grow up, I intend to use "expressivity" in a sentence. Fortunately, after devouring the primers, I have at least a basic understanding of the debate and your very helpful comments. Thank you George for all of this input. Please keep me updated, while I seek a middle ground. I think I see things leaning toward RDFa-Lite, but I don't yet understand if there is an XHTML vs HTML5 factor in play.
>>> I'm going to take one more shot at the end of my document after reviewing this email again and put it in front of the Open Data working group for tomorrows meeting. We still have a couple of weeks to get it right.
>>> btw, One of the tools that I would like to see is one that takes the Data.gov catalog and produces, by agency, a schema.org page in either microdata or RDFa-Lite to help the agencies begin building their /data/published.html page.
>>>
>>>
>>> marion
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 10:25 AM, Thomas, George (OS/ASA/OCIO/OEA) <George.Thomas1@hhs.gov> wrote:
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>>
>>> Marion A. Royal PMP
>>> Program Director, DataGov
>>> GSA Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies
>>> Desk: 202.208.4643
>>> Mobile: 202.302.4634
>>>
>>>
>>